


Pattern Recognition

by voidknight



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Uzumaki (Manga)
Genre: Canon-Typical Body Horror, Descent into Madness, Existential Angst, Gen, Surreal, Unhappy Ending, canon typical for both source materials, it's essentially a rewrite of the ending so beware spoilers, knowledge of uzumaki helpful but unnecessary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:54:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27442261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidknight/pseuds/voidknight
Summary: There was a great evil, she said, and Michael was going to help her fight it.Gertrude Robinson takes Michael Shelley to the village of Kurouzu-cho.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	Pattern Recognition

Michael is not entirely sure why Gertrude Robinson has elected to bring him along with her to Japan. He’d asked about it, just casually, somewhere in the space of the 12 lazy hours that had been spent on the plane—and she’d responded, without taking her eyes off whatever period drama was playing on the little screen in front of her, that she “needed two hands for this” and to “try to get some rest.”

He hadn’t gotten much rest, to be honest, because Michael has never been good at sleeping on planes. He feels jittery all over; he has done since they left Heathrow. It’s his first  _ real _ mission for the Magnus Institute—why wouldn’t he be nervous? And surely there is a reason Getrude chose  _ him. _ Not any of the other assistants. Not Emma, who actually speaks Japanese. Not Eric, who’d be more of a helping hand than Michael, who is skinny and frail and not built for heavy lifting. Is that how he should interpret Gertrude’s request for “two hands”? He doesn’t want to think he was chosen at random, reducible only to the fact that he is a person with a body with which he can (usually) perform physical tasks.

They rent a tiny house in a town that Michael forgets the name of instantly, and spend about three and a half days “preparing.” For him, this means obsessively going over his Japanese notes. Gertrude had urged him to study the language, so he’d done so, of course—thrown himself into it because failure meant disappointing the one person he unequivocally looks up to. He’d had a much easier time of it than the dreary days spent struggling with French in secondary school. Which is interesting, because Japanese is supposed to be an especially difficult language for English speakers to grasp. Yes, the word order is tricky, but Michael’s used to doing mental gymnastics. He likes that it makes  _ sense. _ More or less. Logical and regular.

(He’d mentioned once how quickly his study was going, and he’d gotten a remark about how simply being in the Archives makes learning new things easier. It’s a funny thing to think about, but it’s true—the space you’re in affects the way you think. How wonderful!)

“Studying” also happens to involve staring at the TV and trying to comprehend the reports of giant whirlpools and impossibly disappearing hurricanes, and knowing, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that this absolutely has something to do with the reason that the two of them are here.

For Gertrude, “preparation” means a lot of time spent talking on the phone (in fast, fluent Japanese) and making notes and glancing at her watch. Oh, and going out for hours on end and returning to the house late at night with heavy bags slung over her shoulders. Michael doesn’t ask what’s in these bags, but there sure do seem to be a lot of them.

And finally, they are ready to leave.

Gertrude says that “timing is very important” and “be sure to match my pace.” Michael isn’t worried until she shows him just how fast her pace can be. They gather essentials into backpacks (food and water and such—there’s no telling exactly how long they’ll be gone) and leave their rented house at 6:49 in the morning.

The town fades behind them, and Michael, perhaps a little belatedly, realizes that they are heading into the hills.

It’s a couple hours of walking. Probably. Time starts to slip away from them as they crest hill after forested hill, plunging through the undergrowth in a perfectly straight line that begins after a while to feel not so straight after all. It’s pretty, that’s undeniable. The woods are thin and sunlight streams down through the mottled canopy. Michael can’t help but be a little excited.

He offers to carry Gertrude’s bags (once, twice, too many times), but all she does is give him a Look, and he shuts up. He tries to do small talk. He tries to do small talk in his clumsy Japanese. She barely ever responds.

They walk in the daylight for more hours than should be in a day. Is he just jetlagged? Is that it? Or, no—it can’t have been long at all. One hour, two hours. That would be reasonable. He’d glanced at the map a few times; their destination is a village near the ocean, surrounded by mountains, right next to the town they started out in. Not that far. It shouldn’t be a long journey. And once in a while, it almost feels like that’s true.

They rest, sometimes. Gertrude seems less tired than she should be, for such an old woman.

Michael recounts what he knows about their mission. Where are they going? Kurouzu-cho. A small town in Japan, plagued by something that Gertrude had been studying for years. There was a great evil, she had said, and he was going to help her fight it.

When did the grass begin to curl and twist around itself? When did the straight-trunked trees start to form corkscrews and helices? At first Michael shrugs it off as a fun quirk, an odd mutation of the plant life around here. As they get further in, it begins to feel unnatural. Almost sinister.

Gertrude stops abruptly. She gestures for Michael to get down, and he does, hiding behind a bush with leaves whose veins swirl around and around. It makes him dizzy to look at. Are they moving? It’s like staring into an optical illusion.

He almost doesn’t notice the procession that moves into view a couple paces in front of him. It’s a group of three men—some sort of workers, perhaps, in long coats. One has a helmet, at least. They traipse along a dirt trail, eyes vacant, mouths stained with a horrid sort of mucus. They move like zombies with an intent but unhurried purpose. Their gaze is fixed straight ahead, oblivious to their observers.

Once they’re out of earshot, Gertrude gestures Michael forward again. They don’t take the trail, instead following the gentle slope of the hill as it carries them downwards through the grass and ferns. Gertrude is faster now, eyes cold and calculating as she glances once again at her watch and then peers out across the forest landscape.

“Be careful,” she says as Michael nearly trips over a log whose rings have deformed into the shape of a spiral. “Time is of the utmost importance. I didn’t anticipate we’d run into others. Those few seconds could have cost us—”

And then she stops.

Through the gaps in the trees, the town of Kurouzu-cho is suddenly made visible. Or—at least, Michael  _ thinks _ it’s the town of Kurouzu-cho. May have once been that town. A very long time ago. Because all he can see, as he watches with mouth agape and stomach twisting, is one impossibly long, thin structure (house?) curved into the shape of a tight spiral.

“We’re too late,” Gertrude whispers, and plunges back into the forest. They’re sprinting now, and Michael feels like his head is about to burst. The whole journey’s had a dreamlike quality—yes, he’s tired and hungry and filled to the brim with nauseous fear, but most of all he feels like he’s slipping. Like he’s quietly started to lose his mind. The grass is much too coiled; everything,  _ everything _ around him has fallen into that pattern. Surrounded by haunting spirals. Clustered like warts in reality, impossible yet all too present.

The thing that took his best friend left spirals in its wake, he remembers. He would dream of them. He would see things in the corner of his vision that synced up with the images of his nightmares, things that could not possibly exist. Things that drew his eyes to their center and held him in that terrified paralysis.

Is he going mad? Was this town created to torment him?

They burst out of the woods and stand, panting, on flat ground once more. That structure looms before them, up close now, and Michael can see how it’s shackled together with recycled material—sheets of metal and plywood and crumbling clay. Woven too perfectly. Could human hands have constructed such a thing, with such mathematical precision?

There’s one moment of pure silence, as the two of them survey the curving wall. It feels as if they’ve entered into a ghost town. Empty and still.

Then Gertrude marches forward, pulls a crowbar from one of her bags, and tears off a section of the wall with a strength she’s never displayed before. Before Michael can marvel at her prowess, the warped metal hits the ground with a muted clang, and Gertrude has disappeared into the building.

The inside is even more desolate than the outside, somehow. It’s a skeleton of a house, a hall that seems to be defined by its vacancy. Barren posts hold up the roof. It smells absolutely awful—like festering flesh, like sweat and grime and bodies baked together.

Gertrude wastes no time. She stows the crowbar back into her backpack and breaks into a sprint. How she knows which direction to go is a mystery, but Michael trusts her more than he ever has before.

And—finally—as they wind deeper and deeper into the spiral labyrinth, the curves of the walls getting steeper and more evident—two figures appear in their vision.

Gertrude slows. An immense relief radiates from her entire demeanor, and she comes to a halt just before the figures. It’s a boy and a girl—older teens, probably—with dirty, torn clothing and fearful expressions. The boy is wearing a piece of stained cloth, tied around his neck like a cape. They watch the newcomers with a hopelessness indicative of great, irreversible loss.

The boy asks Gertrude a question. He sounds so very tired, like he almost doesn’t care about the answer. Gertrude responds. Michael isn’t thinking straight—he catches bits and pieces, but his Japanese was never that good anyway, and whatever his boss is telling these strangers is almost completely lost on him. But as she continues her explanation—for that’s what he assumes it is, though she never mentions their origin or the Magnus Institute—the boy’s eyes begin to widen behind the cracked lenses of his glasses. He interrupts, and the two of them go back and forth for some time, conversing fluidly.

Michael’s gaze slips over to the girl. She’s watching with some detached interest, but her eyes keep wandering down the length of the architecture around them, like she’s passively searching for something. Or someone.

Finally, Gertrude steps back, and the four of them start down the winding passageway again. Her earlier franticness has completely evaporated, leaving only that cold determination that has characterized so much of her manner on this journey. Is she afraid? No, of course not; she’s too composed. Gertrude Robinson eats fear for breakfast! A silly spiral won’t scare her—Michael shouldn’t let it frighten him either.

“Hi,” says the girl, in Japanese.

Michael jumps. He hadn’t noticed her fall back to walk beside him; nerves entirely unrelated to the task at hand run through his entire body.

“Hi,” he echoes.

“I’m Kirie.”

“I’m, ah, Michael. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” she replies, matching his overly-formal tone. A smile tugs at her lips. The irony is not lost on either of them—such an everyday conversation in such a strange situation.

“That’s Gertrude,” says Michael, gesturing to his boss in front of him, who is having her own quiet talk with the sullen boy. “Who is he?”

“Shuichi. My boyfriend.”

“Cool.”

“Where are you from?”

Michael has a split-second of panic as he realizes he cannot remember the word for  _ England. _ He ends up saying, “The Magnus Institute?” in English. Then remembers he could have just said England in English too, and it would have been understood, and then feels very stupid.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a place, that, um, studies things,” he responds, helpfully.

“Things like this?”

“Yeah.”

_ “Uzumaki?” _

“What?”

She traces a spiral shape in the air with her finger, grimacing as she does so.

“I think so.” Probably. “Scary. It’s… scary.”

“Very scary.”

The light at the end of the passage is fast approaching. Michael walks quicker, tension mounting inside him as he tries to conceive what could possibly be in the center of this twisting labyrinth. But, as far as he can see, there doesn’t seem to be anything.

The four of them pause at the edge of the final building, and Michael feels his stomach turn over.

There is a gigantic hole, inside of which a spiral staircase descends into oblivion. The stairs look ancient—a fact that Shuichi points out quickly—and are made of crumbling grey stone. A thin trail of swirling smoke rises from deep within it. There is no light at the bottom here. Just darkness and vertigo and hallucinations. One wrong step and Michael is sure he’ll tumble down there into those infinite, unknowable depths, and then perhaps the spiral will claim him fully.

Gertrude puts a steadying hand on his shoulder, and he gulps.

Kirie and Shuichi seem to be arguing about something. Michael doesn’t have it in him to try and make sense of their words as they curl through the air with panicked spikes and fearful scampers. He thinks he’s going to faint.

But he doesn’t hesitate when Gertrude steps forward and starts down the stairs. The pair of teens follows. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the stones are smeared with something dark and sickly—blood? Other fluids? The stench from earlier is weaker here, but hasn’t completely disappeared. He doesn’t want to think about what that might imply.

The four of them descend into the spiral, and watch as the blackness swallows them up.

Time slows to a crawl, or perhaps to a kind of ooze. A feverish haze fogs up Michael’s brain. It does not mix well with his perpetual anxiety. The dizziness is stronger here; he keeps his eyes fixed firmly on Gertrude’s back, not letting himself glance upwards or downwards. If he looks up, he’ll see how far away the sky is. If he looks down, he’ll see how far they have left to go.

Kirie and Shuichi walk hand in hand. Michael’s still curious about them—they are sure to have plenty of stories to tell, as seemingly the last survivors of Kurouzu-cho—but he thinks his brain will break if he attempts to speak another word of Japanese. Better to focus on the real and the tangible, rather than the way his mind bends and buckles and lies. The cool stone beside him and below him. The air that hangs thick and rancid.

They’ll be out soon. It’ll be done soon. Soon, soon. When is “soon?” How long ago did they begin their journey over the mountains? When did he last sleep? Lifetimes ago, probably. Unless he’s asleep right now.

Why is he here? Why did Gertrude take him? She doesn’t  _ need _ him. She’s got Kirie and Shuichi; he’s been little more than an impediment, a weight that drags behind, slowing them down. Is he supposed to learn something from this? That the world is frightful and mysterious and impossible to explain. He  _ knows _ that already. Maybe it’s a test. See how much he can endure. See if he can come out with his wits intact.

Gertrude stops. There’s something in front of them. Well—not quite in  _ front _ of them, more  _ across  _ from them, laying in their way on the other side of the corkscrew staircase. It’s pale and fleshy, contorted into tight spirals that sprawl over the path like an uprooted vine. It’s not until he peers closer that Michael notices the clawed hand resting on the edge of the step, or the head, hanging from a long, limp neck, encased in skin stretched tight across the bone.

Michael jumps backwards and collides with the wall behind him. A scream wells up in his throat, but he pushes it down with all his might, eyes fixated on the horrid, inhuman shape. Its gaunt face, its unnatural paleness, the way that its limbs twist and twist in ways that bones would never allow for. If he had been looking, he would see that Kirie and Shuichi’s gazes held a similar disgust, but no surprise.

In the blink of an eye, Gertrude has retrieved her crowbar and is advancing on the spiral creature. Michael thinks he hears it try to speak to her, try to plead or explain or protest, but before it can finish the sentence, she’s hooked the end of the crowbar around its thin torso and hurled it into the abyss below. It falls with no sound, not even a whimper.

And without another word, they continue.

Just take one step, then another, then another. Keep moving. It’s a mechanical motion. Michael’s knees and back and the soles of his feet throb with pain, though he can’t be sure the pain is even real, not anymore.

The stairs have to lead  _ somewhere. _ Gertrude wouldn’t be taking them this far if it was all for nothing. She is a being of purpose, of efficiency—not one to wander a maze if there were no goal in sight.

An indeterminate amount of time later, Kirie suddenly points downwards.

There’s a light. It’s just a pinprick, but it fills Michael with a sudden determination. There is something at the bottom after all—unless the light is a collective hallucination, unless the spiral is tricking them once more.

But as they head deeper and deeper, the patch of brightness grows and grows, and Michael’s hope and fear swell to a fever pitch.

They’re almost there.

And at the end is—

It looks like a shell. A gigantic, stone snail shell, the size of the tunnel they’ve just descended. And below it—there is something below it. Something big and bright and beautiful.

With each new step, Michael gets another glimpse of the world underneath. It’s a cavern. It’s made of ancient rock that shines with an unearthly glow. It’s a space where spirals form out of the earth as naturally as the millions of stalactites that drip from the curved ceiling. He cannot comprehend its depth; searching for a floor makes his head swim with vertigo. So he keeps his eyes on the staircase until the steps taper off and he can no longer ignore the massive thing below them.

At the very end of the stair, Gertrude turns around, addressing the two fearful teenagers behind her in language so clear and measured that even Michael can understand.

“You have a choice here,” she says. “Once we descend, it will be much harder to leave. The Spiral wants you to stay here. It needs the two of you in order to finish its ritual and become complete. If you choose to follow me, rather than turn around and take this chance at escape, you must promise me that you will try to resist the Spiral’s call for as long as possible.”

Shuichi and Kirie share a glance, and there is only a moment of hesitation before Shuichi responds, “We promise. We’ll come with you.”

The next few minutes are a blur. Gertrude produces a rope from a bag and fastens it to a sturdy rock outcropping, then, with remarkable strength that probably should no longer be a surprise, lowers herself onto the conical structure directly below them. Michael shuts off the part of his brain that has dissolved into panic and racing thoughts, and follows her, forcing himself not to think of what will happen if he slips, if he falls, if he isn’t strong enough.

Below the rocky shell is a cylindrical shaft that stretches all the way down to the bottom of the cavern. A thick stone helix snakes around it, and after Gertrude makes her way onto it, securing more rope, all that’s left is to follow the path downwards. Kirie and Shuichi follow as well—with some difficulty, but neither fall, which is impressive. Michael tries to forget about them; if he does, he’ll have less to worry about.

Descending the helix is much more perilous than the staircase. It’s a sheer slope, and a thin one at that, and Michael hugs the wall, clinging as close as he can to the cool shaft, as if the rough-hewn rock is any replacement for a bannister. He desperately wants to look out over the cavern, but doing so even for a second creates showers of hallucinatory sparks that pop and swirl in his vision, and makes him horribly dizzy, so much that he fears he’ll stumble and go plummeting off the edge. More than once he has felt the space shifting; every time he tries to estimate the size of the chamber it seems different.

Finally, after what feels like hours, they are close enough to the bottom that Michael feels brave enough to risk a glance downwards.

The floor is a sea of mutated bodies. Whorled limbs and soulless eyes. Naked and hairless and impossibly twisted. The sprawling figure on the stairs, multiplied a thousandfold. They wait, still and coiled—like snakes, maybe, or an infinity of snail shells—in perfect silence and rapture.

Michael has transcended the ability to feel disgust. He simply feels numb. He’s sure that he’s passed some sort of breaking point, that he has finally gone mad.

And when they come to the end of the corkscrew, the bodies stretch out before them, soft underneath their shoes. They don’t protest when Gertrude marches across them, careful to avoid stepping on any faces.

“Michael,” she says softly.

He tears his eyes away from the living floor, and looks up.

It isn’t something he can describe, not really. A city? A megastructure? A piece of architecture whose construction he cannot conceive of—a radiant, mesmerizing edifice of spirals. Spirals like coiled leaves, shapes that are natural yet wholly unnatural, real and present in the hard stone yet could not possibly exist. He cannot see the tops of the jutting spires. The patterns bleed into each other, forming clusters down below, while the huge, bulbous spiral forms sit at the very top. The concave ones feel like horns or megaphones, broadcasting their siren song.

And for the first time in his life, Michael can tell with absolute certainty that there is something going on here that is larger than him, some cosmic truth whose full picture has been shattered and warped and wrapped up in silence and cobwebs. The hand that built these ruins, the mind that formed their shapes, the mind that still thrums within them like an irregular, maddening heartbeat—it originates from the same body as that which touched him so long ago, that took his friend, that has followed him through his time at the Institute. Not a  _ who, _ but a  _ what. _ Something that is not what it is. Something that shifts and confuses and deceives. It built a city of insanity and it revels in what it has done to the town above.

Gertrude’s eyes hold no awe. No doubt. She gives no indication that what she sees is anything more or less than was expected.

And Michael is so very afraid.

Kirie and Shuichi are nowhere to be seen. He supposes they must’ve run off somewhere—looking for someone? Staring into each dazed, stony face and searching for a glint of recognition? He hopes they’ll remember what they promised Gertrude. But he is finding it hard to resist the call of the Spiral himself.

“What are we going to do now?” he whispers.

Gertrude sets her backpack down on a twisted leg and opens it to reveal—

“Is that C-4?” Michael asks with an incredulous tone entirely unbefitting the aura of the stupendous city.

“It does the job,” she replies, and begins to unload the truly astounding amount of plastic explosives which she has apparently been carrying this entire time. She hands him one of multiple baggies, filled to the brim with pale, clay-like blocks. “Set these around as quickly as you can. Target the bottoms of the less-sturdy structures and the centers of any particularly large spirals.”

Michael glances about. His unsteady footing serves as an uncomfortable reminder of what exactly he is standing on. “What about all the people here?”

“They aren’t people anymore.”

He could argue. He could defend their humanity. Their lives. The way they lay so blissfully, eyes fixed upon the tallest glowing spire.

He nods without a word, feeling a knot in his stomach as he does so.

Gertrude gives him a couple more instructions—how far apart to set the explosives, what configuration to lay them in, an abridged version of the proper handling procedures—and with all that buzzing around in his head, he sets off.

It’s better than climbing down an endless staircase, that’s for sure, but this new task has its own host of anxieties associated with it. Michael is constantly worried that he’s going to run out of C-4. The cavern seems to go on forever; though he can see its walls, he can’t seem to reach the place where they connect to the floor. As he walks farther out, the layer of bodies below him gets thinner and thinner; the helical towers grow smaller and natural stalagmites begin to replace them.

Right. If they’re trying to bring down the city, this is maybe a bit too far. He makes a mental map of where he would consider the “perimeter” of the ruins, and circles around it, placing explosives at the base of the largest spires. Meanwhile, he can see Gertrude in the distance, scaling the structure in the center.

Michael can’t say how long it takes. Maybe hours, maybe days. He has been tired all this time, but by now it’s seeped into his bones. He’s more spiral than person at this point, he thinks, and that makes him laugh. He hasn’t eaten or slept or even sat down in—how long? This place is doing strange things to him. It tugs at him like so many grasping hands. Tells him that maybe he could just lie down, surrender to the dreamscape, become a part of the architecture.

But he can’t give up. Gertrude is counting on him. He needs to be her second pair of hands.

At last he is out of C-4. He barely registers it when he uses up the last piece. By this point, a map of the entire cavern is etched across his brain; its spirals have sunk deep, deep into him. What use is a map of an impossible place? Does the edifice itself delight in his confusion? Has it perhaps branded him?

Standing in the middle of the city of spirals, on top of the petrified remains of the twisted things that used to be human, Michael realizes that he has given up the hope of returning to the real world.

He finds Gertrude kneeling before Kirie and Shuchi. The two of them are sat with their fingers intertwined, gazing down at a pair of stone figures. Kirie’s face is stained with tear tracks.

Gertrude’s bag is much lighter, now, he realizes. She must have placed the rest of the C-4. Her hair has come loose from its tight bun; it sits, unkempt, on her shoulders.

The three of them look up at Michael. Two pairs of eyes that are too exhausted to be frightened, and one pair that he cannot read at all.

His vision—and reality itself—goes fuzzy around the edges.

“Michael,” comes Gertrude’s voice. “Your hair.”

Michael’s hands instantly go to the back of his head. It was wavy before, but now it coils into itself, echoing the curling patterns all around him. He hadn’t even noticed the change. Had it happened gradually? All at once, when he realized that—?

Shuichi breaks eye contact and mutters something about the Spiral claiming another. But Gertrude’s gaze is sharp. She rises to her feet, not taking her eyes off of Michael. Calculating.

And he didn’t think he could get any more afraid, but here he is with his heart beating so very fast, nausea consuming the edges of his mind, spinning and spinning and spinning.

“It seems,” she says quietly, “that a change of plans will be necessary.”

Her words filter in and out of Michael’s awareness. The world around him has taken on a blurred quality, moving simultaneously too fast and too slow. Since when was he sitting down? Since when did his back press against a multitude of stone limbs, outstretched fingers hooking on his shirt? He feels as if he is about to unravel. Shuichi and Kirie’s faces bear a similar resignation to that which now pulses through him; they may as well be statues already.

He’s so tired. He’s tired of standing and walking and listening and  _ thinking. _

And then Gertrude is speaking to him once more. Something small, hard, and rectangular is pressed into his palm. As his fingers curl around it, he distantly recognizes it as a detonator.

“Michael,” Gertrude says. Her voice sounds far away now. It conveys no emotion but urgency. “It seems that the ritual will not be complete until the Spiral has claimed its last victim. At that time, the helix will ascend up into the spiral staircase, and this chamber will be sealed. It is imperative that we put an end to the workings of the Twisting Deceit, but that cannot happen until every piece is in the right place. I am going to travel back to the surface. As soon as the helix has locked into place—no sooner and no later—you will press this button and destroy this structure once and for all. Do you understand?”

But why would Michael want to destroy such ineffable spiraling beauty?

No, he made a promise. He came here for a reason. To fight a great evil. He doesn’t think he understands anymore—his mind is coming undone—but he has been given one final task, and the least he can do is see it through to its conclusion. He  _ trusts _ Gertrude Robinson.

He nods.

And so Gertrude turns her back and makes her way back up the helix from which they descended. Michael watches her until she is a speck in the sky, a tiny moving dot, dark against the gleam of the rocks.

Kirie and Shuichi are gone, he realizes. No, they’re here, but—it’s not them, is it. Their limbs have grown too long; they’ve tangled each other into knots that could never be unbound. And  _ that _ is beautiful too, in its own little horrifying way. It’s the way of the world, maybe, he thinks. They’re all back where they should be at last.

Michael doesn’t have anyone to hold him as the Spiral’s essence percolates through his body. It drips through his veins, making fractals out of their branching trees. His fingers are too long, he registers faintly. He is being rendered into abstract geometry. How… freeing.

The scrape of stone against stone continues for a long, long time. There always seems to be more of that corkscrew, rising up out of the ground to fill the empty space of the stairwell. Gertrude must be riding atop the snail shell formation at its head. She’ll be safe, then. Everything is going to be okay.

He’s still clutching the detonator. He barely remembers what it is, but he remembers his instructions.

The cavern shifts, throbs, reinvents itself in showers of twisted spacetime. It is utterly impossible. Everything about it is so mind-numbingly unreal—the size, the shape, the intricate, alien patterns. It sings. It breathes. It laughs softly. It revels in its own completeness and its  _ becoming. _

And the noise stops, and the space is sealed—

And everything, for one perfect, eternal moment, is still and bright and  _ wonderful. _

With the last of his strength, with fingers that no longer belong to him, Michael presses the button.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has been a LONG time coming - i’m so glad i finally worked up the motivation to finish it!
> 
> this was pretty emotionally draining to write - that, plus the fact that i fell into a new fixation shortly after i’d written the bulk of the story, meant that i didn’t go back and finish it until now. i would like to thank [this](https://youtu.be/2GK54-ouFBk) extremely good video of junji ito reacting to cats for reminding me that uzumaki exists and prompting me to finally complete and post this.


End file.
